During the Roman occupation of Britain, a series of Germanic peoples served in their legions and settled in what was to become England. By the middle of the fifth century, the population of the southern part of the island had become a Romano-British-Germanic hybrid. After the Romans withdrew from Britain in 410, competing chieftains hired Germanic mercenaries to fight for them and these were mainly Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes, who inhabited the Continental North Sea coastlands. Many of the mercenaries settled in the new land and they were joined over centuries by further Anglo-Saxon settlers, in small (and often family) bands, who travelled up the river valleys from the east and south and mainly settled on virgin land, usually in woodland clearings.
An Anglo-Saxon Village
Over time, these groups coalesced into larger units, which became kingdoms, especially those known as the Heptarchy: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex.
By 1066, Anglo-Saxon England was a non-expansionist confederation of six earldoms, which included Northumbria and Mercia, but it was overwhelmed and destroyed by the Norman Conquest from 1066 and its historic regions were illegally abolished. A series of English revolts followed, but all were crushed, although it was well into the twelfth century before all of Northumbria was under Norman control.
The Death of Harold Godwinesson, the King of the English Confederation, at the Battle of Hastings
The French-speaking Normans imposed an hereditary monarchy upon the English people, who were downgraded from freemen to ‘subjects of the crown’, that is they became owned by the monarch, as the people of the United Kingdom (the successor state of the Norman Empire) remain today. The Normans practised a policy of apartheid, with French being the language of the rulers and the organisation of the land for 300 years.
There remained continual English resistance to the Norman Yoke, overtly for centuries, and periodic attempts to overthrow it, for example through the 1381 Great Society (Peasants’ Revolt) and the demands for the restoration of ancient English freedoms by the Levellers and Agitators in the 1640s, which resulted in the execution of Charles 1.
Statue of Robin Hood, the famous English Freedom Fighter
Today little has changed in essence. England remains locked inside the crumbling United Kingdom empire, Norman in origin, which shows no inclination to release the English regions from its weakening grip. The UK’s hereditary monarchy continues to own its people as ‘subjects of the crown’, the political system still just about pays lip service to a sham democracy, Establishment privilege remains rife, destructive individualism is rapidly demolishing the fabric of society and the environment is being destroyed at an ever-faster rate.
However, English regionalism began to reawaken in the second half of the twentieth century and became increasingly radical in the Midlands, with the formation of The Mercia Movement in 1993 and Independent Mercia in 2003. The success of the Scottish National Party has inspired many English people to seek their own exit from the UK through their historic regions, which is presenting a growing challenge to the centralisation of the UK. An important development within this struggle was the foundation of Independent Northumbria in 2019 and its membership grew rapidly in 2021, as did that of Independent Mercia, the registered citizens of which had reached 2,500 by the spring of that year.
As the result of an English Independent Regions meeting between Independent Mercia and Independent Northumbria in Birmingham on 4 January 2020, the two organisations agreed to form The English Confederation under the campaign name of Independent England, for mutual support, to help to progress their drive to independence. Following the drafting and then the full agreement of The Constitution of The English Confederation by the two independent regions in July 2020, Independent England has become a force for the liberation of Northumbria and Mercia from the Norman Yoke of the illegal UK and for the implementation of their de facto independence, as holistic societies based on the principles of organic democracy, co-operative community and ecological balance.
The Official Independent England (English Confederation) Image
Please join us by registering as an English citizen of Mercia or Northumbria to help us bring our vision of the future into reality.
Further reading
1066: The Story of a Year, Denis Butler, Anthony Blond Ltd, 1966.
1066: The Year of the Conquest, David Howarth, Wm Collins Sons & Co Ltd, 1978.
The Norman Conquest of the North, William E. Kapelle, ISBN 0-7099-0040-6, University of North Carolina Press, 1979.
The English Resistance: The Underground War Against the Normans, Peter Rex, ISBN 0-7524282-7-6, Tempus Publishing Ltd, 2004.
The English Rebel: One thousand Years of Troublemaking from the Normans to the Nineties, David Horspool, ISBN 978-0-141-02547-6, Penguin Books, 2010.
Puritanism & Revolution, Essay 3, The Norman Yoke, Christopher Hill, ISBN 0-4362032-0-0, Secker & Warburg, 1958.
Liberty Against The Law, Essay 5, Robin Hood, and Essay 6, Robin Hood, Possessive Individualism and the Norman Yoke, Christopher Hill, ISBN 0-713-99119-4, The Penguin Press, 1996.
Bondmen Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381, Rodney Hilton, ISBN 9780-4150188-0-7, Routledge, 1995.
A Radical Reader: The struggle for change in England, 1381-1914, Christopher Hampton (editor), Penguin Books Ltd, 1984.
The Mercia Manifesto: A Blueprint for the Future Inspired by the Past, The Mercia Movement, ISBN 0-9529152-1-9, Witan Books, 1997.